Gunfight at the <i> Auteur</i> ‘s Corral : Director’s cuts on video can be artistically legitimate. And then there’s ‘Wyatt Earp.’

When Lawrence Kasdan’s “Wyatt Earp” was released last year, most people thought it way too long. It was a box-office dud. Now its 192-minute running time has been expanded--yes, you heard correctly, expanded --for videocassette and laser disc in the recently released 212-minute director’s cut supervised by Kasdan. Too much of a bad thing? Is this the last straw in the current director’s cut follies?

It turns out that the new “Earp,” though still no masterpiece, at least is truer to its own expansiveness. There are sandstorms and rainstorms and Sioux scouting parties we haven’t seen before. We see the funereal aftermath of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Wyatt has more scenes with Doc, with Virgil, with Josie. Mostly what we get overall are brief character touches and more panorama.

Is it worth (re)viewing? Only if you’re a “Wyatt Earp” completist.

Or maybe a Kevin Costner completist. We’ve already had the director’s cut of “JFK”--17 minutes were added to make it a grand total of 206 walloping minutes of conspiracy mongering. And earlier this year Costner figured in the four--count ‘em, four--hours on video of “Dances With Wolves.” That’s about an hour more Dancing than in the theatrical version. The changes are mostly dribs and drabs of what was already apparent in the original. Lt. Dunbar romps more with Two Socks (the wolf); he communes more with the Sioux; it’s less confusing now why the troops abandoned the fort; holy man Kicking Bird takes Dances With Wolves to sacred Sioux ground. As with “Wyatt Earp” and “JFK,” a too-long movie is now longer.

A few years back director’s cuts began to enter the video mainstream big time. Why the stampede?

Partly it’s a selling tool--in the same spirit as the “New and Improved” labeling on the plain old detergent in your supermarket. Sometimes it’s a way to appease powerful directors and stars who were compelled by the studios to part with stray bits of filmic minutiae. On occasion it’s a way to restore sequences that were unjustly dropped by censors and fussbudgets. Or it’s just a way to get sexier or more violent stuff into the video versions for those who like their movies even hotter.

Of the many director’s cuts out there on video, few have any artistic legitimacy. Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” will be brought out later in the year in the uncut version that played L.A. theaters in March (although the video version that already exists is just about identical).

Probably the best, and most famous, is Ridley Scott’s revamped “Blade Runner” (which, in its changed form, also had a brief theatrical release as a buildup to the video version). Gone is the somnolent, you-are-getting-sleepy narration by Harrison Ford; gone is the upbeat finale. There’s more of a suggestion, with the addition of Ford’s unicorn dream, that he too is a replicant. It’s a better movie now, even darker and more disturbing.

The director’s cut of Elia Kazan’s 1951 “A Streetcar Named Desire” is likewise a better film. In other words, it cuts closer to the bone of Tennessee Williams’ play, as the deletions and compromises brought on by the Motion Picture Production Code police have been rectified. The total additional screen time is only about three minutes, but the extra footage figures in at least a dozen scenes. Now Blanche’s sexual hunger isn’t as perfumed, and the sordidness of her past is filled in; her rape by Stanley is unavoidably obvious. Kim Hunter’s Stella smolders a lot longer on the staircase than she did before. What the uncut “Streetcar” does is to restore a great film to its fullest effect.

Sometimes the additional material in director’s cuts is a matter of a single, previously censored scene. “Spartacus” on video now has an additional sequence featuring Laurence Olivier as a lascivious Roman senator having a cryptic spa-side conversation with Singer-of-Songs slave boy Tony Curtis about oysters and some such. It’s supposed to be enigmatically titillating. The uncut “Lawrence of Arabia” on video has the scene in which Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence is gang-raped by Arabs.

Director’s cuts can include extra scenes spread throughout the film (as in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’), a single, previously censored scene (a gay-themed interaction in ‘Spartacus’) or even a radically different ending (see ‘Fatal Attraction’).

Richard Rush’s neo-noir “Color of Night,” which was slammed when it opened last year, is about 20 minutes longer now, including a demure lesbian scene between Jane March and Lesley Ann Warren and what looks to me to be a bit more underwater hanky-panky between March and Bruce Willis. The mystery-thriller plot has been made slightly less confusing. The problem with this movie was--still is--that you have no great desire to untangle the plot to begin with.

Some video stores carry the cut of “Fatal Attraction” that offers the alternate ending in which Glenn Close’s revenger kills herself as well as boiling the bunny rabbit. The uncut “True Romance” has a more garish beating-up scene involving Patricia Arquette, just in case you didn’t flinch enough at the original.

The uncut “The Abyss,” available, unlike these others, only on laser disc, has more glug-glugging. There are about 20 more minutes of escaping in the director’s cut of “Escape From New York,” which also features John Carpenter explaining it all to you. And even “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” is chunkier these days, with Jim Carrey posing in a previously deleted scene as a German dolphin instructor.

But you know this director’s cut stuff has reached meltdown when you are greeted with the news that there will shortly be an uncut video version of the Chris Elliott snorer “Cabin Boy.” Yes, “Cabin Boy.”

Can you stand it?